What The Caring.com Acquisition Means For Senior Living Sales And Marketing

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Earlier this week, we caught wind that SilverAssist had acquired Caring.com. The move expanded SilverAssist’s digital footprint into referrals, but more than that, I think it’s indicative of how senior living sales and marketing is changing from a volume game to one measured in relationships.

By acquiring Caring.com, SilverAssist has assembled a company with services that include helping older adults access resources and pay for their senior living stay, and now also referring them to communities that can serve their needs.

Senior living prospects in 2025 are doing their own research and are often awash in a sea of information and options. It makes sense to me that a company like SilverAssist would focus on guidance, financial planning and more accurate data rather than solely providing more leads to partners. Indeed, that is the philosophy of Greg Mason, SilverAssist’s CEO.

“Digital aggregators have cast a long shadow on the industry in their approach of how they collect leads, and how their call centers drive a mentality around generating lead credit,” Mason told me earlier this week. “But it comes at the expense of the family experience.”

Caring.com’s biggest competitor, A Place for Mom, also is taking a similar approach by pivoting toward empathetic messaging that reflects “how families find, fund, and feel through the caregiving process.”

As Mason alluded, senior living operators have not always reported good experiences with their referral partners in the past. Large companies such as Sonida Senior Living (NYSE: SNDA) and Brookdale Senior Living (NYSE: BKD) haven’t eschewed working with big referral partners entirely, but they have worked to generate more of their leads in-house. Gone are the days of leads at all costs. Instead, operators like Sonida are building marketing efforts “based on what each community needs and what works best in each local market whether that be local outreach, smaller boutique referral companies, digital advertising,” as CEO Brandon Ribar told SHN in 2024.

Senior living operators and their partners are increasingly building sales processes that ferry prospects through every point in their upcoming decision, from moving out of their home and paying for their initial stay to finding the exact right community for their desires and wallet.

The senior living sales process has always required empathy, but I believe the referral landscape in senior living is, with the rise of the baby boomers, reforming around trust, personalized, local market information and addressing affordability concerns. Increasingly, operators and their referral partners must not only help a prospective resident see themselves living in a community, but also how they will pay for it over the course of their stay or how they will access health care as they age.

Putting the pieces together, I think SilverAssist’s Caring.com and slate of services are yet another indication that the trend is not slowing down. I also think it shows they believe that prospects desire more of a one-stop-shop for services as they look for senior living. And above all else, it speaks to the money and attention given to reaping demand as it grows in the years ahead.

In this week’s SHN+ Update, I analyze the recent SilverAssist acquisition of Caring.com and other sales and marketing moves from operators and offer the following takeaways:

• Why SilverAssist acquired Caring.com

• How baby boomer demand is changing the nature of senior living referrals

• How these and other moves are reshaping sales and marketing

Caring.com deal aimed at taking industry from ‘volume-driven’ leads to ‘real relationships’

SilverAssist’s Caring.com acquisition is aimed at helping the industry change what Mason sees as a lack of personalization and relationship building in senior living sales and marketing, where call centers optimize for “lead credit” rather than providing the most qualified leads possible to improve conversions. That ultimately leads to operators feeling burned out on sheer lead volume alone contrasted with lower conversion rates.

I don’t think operators are necessarily burned out on leads, but they are careful not to duplicate their efforts or chase leads that aren’t qualified. I think sales and marketing teams are actually burned out from the uncertainty around leads provided to them. When prospect information doesn’t include important data like timeline, budget or care needs, it forces sales teams to do initial discovery work, ultimately slowing down the process and potentially jeopardizing the trust a prospect has with a community.

Mason told me that too often, operators receive extensive lead lists from referral partners, and in recent years, these “volume-driven” lead sources have not been as lucrative as in past years as prospective senior living buyers want an experience that feels personal and unique, he told me.

The acquisition of Caring.com, will help add a major destination online for consumers considering senior living and will expand SilverAssist’s referral network reach across the country, Mason told me.

With rising needs from prospects, a rapidly aging group of older adults and a still-frozen rate of new construction, demand is not a current problem for senior living operators.

Where the industry still struggles is in its ability to translate search behavior into finding the “move-in-ready” families that operators actually want, and in breaking through the noise of constant leads.

The winners in senior living referrals will be the ones able to cancel out the noise and connect with families and prospects on a personal level.

Boomers require navigation

Referral sites like Caring.com and its new owner increasingly believe they must become a one-stop-shop navigation platform. Not only must they match prospects and communities, but also assuage affordability concerns and provide data to operators that informs their local sales and marketing practices.

“We’re not dealing with digits here,” Mason told me. “We don’t use the world leads, we’re talking about families.”

SilverAssist, now with the scope provided by Caring.com, will continue to collect “a lot of information from the outset” the moment a prospect visits its website—this will allow for “higher predictability” of “actual intent” by prospective senior living customers and pair it with the company’s existing services, Mason told me.

Those services for SilverAssist include Oasis Senior Advisors, local networks of experts that help older adults understand senior living services in their local area and ElderLife Financial, a company that helps older adults and their families financially plan for paying senior living costs with resources and benefit guides to minimize costs.

Senior living providers will need these close-knit partnerships with referral providers capable of offering local insight and financial coaching for families, and Mason said it’s up to third-party agencies to “earn the trust” of operators.

To do that, Mason hopes to create the “everything” model of senior living referrals and services, capable of providing all services prospects might need in order to start a move to a community. This to me signals that referral platforms must become a “navigation platform” that can help families and couples seeking senior living options to manuever challenges easily.

This type of thinking treats incoming senior living demand, driven by boomers, not as a demographic inevitability but as a moment when referral platforms and operators can work more closely together to create a clearer path in the discovery phase, providing educational resources and sharing information that ultimately places older adults in the right community for them.

In the quest to fit in during the AI age, Mason told me the company is positioning SilverAssist’s suite of services to “appeal to AI search.” However, Mason believes the current hype around AI search and answer engines is “at the peak.” Mason also noted that typical buying profiles of those seeking third-party referral services are usually adult children, typically an adult daughter in her 50s. In Mason’s view, she is “not using ChatGPT for the most part.”

While SilverAssist must prepare for AI search trends, Mason told me that traditional search engines remain a large share of inquiries for senior living services.

But that’s not to say that older adults are shying away from using AI tools. AI use among older adults rose from 18% in 2024 to 30% in 2025. Among those who use AI, 58% interact with specific AI platforms or apps. According to a recent AARP report, older adults use the technology for health monitoring, such as answering health questions or providing health or nutrition guidance.

At the end of the day, I can see a world where prospects use AI tools to start their search and quickly land in the arms of a referral partner that ferries them through the rest of the process. Although I think senior living operators can source some of these leads on their own, referral partners like APFM and Caring.com will be able to do more heavy lifting at scale. But all of this will hinge on referral partners’ ability to work with operators, and vice versa.

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